Chatterday! Open Thread.

This is our weekly Chatterday! open thread. Use this open thread to talk amongst yourselves: feel free to share a link, have a vent, or spread some joy.

What have you been reading or watching lately (remembering spoiler warnings)? What are you proud of this week? What’s made your teeth itch? What’s going on in your part of the world? Feel free to add your own images. (Anna insists that these should only be of ponies, but I insist that very small primates, camelids, critters from the weasel family, smooching giraffes, and cupcakes are also acceptable.) Just whack in a bare link to a webpage, please – admin needs to deal with the HTML code side of things.

@ Sammie: ah, that sounds cool. I mostly hate snow due to the difficulties it provides me with navigation, and we don’t have enough snow here to dance in anyway, but the weather forecast warned us that we’d get a lot of snow over the week-end.

We got snow and I saw it fall Thursday morning and today (still a kid!). It won’t get above freezing this weekend. We’ve got some bad black ice on our driveway, and many secondary roads aren’t salted/cleared (of the horrifying half inch of snow). They’ve had issues with what school system to close – the county was closed Thursday, while the city was open. Today, the county was open and the city was closed.

One of the other issues is the bitter cold – it’s not above freezing – what do you do when you have to wait for the bus at 6:30 in the morning and it’s not even 20 F? And my mom’s kids remind me of a joke about preschool/kindergarten – “What did you today?” “The teacher helped us out of our winter clothes, we sat down, and then she helped us put it back on.”

In non-winter news, I’m doing very good after my laprascopy and nerve ablation. The pain is dull, and I think it’s just the muscle.(At the appt before the lap, he said there were two pain spots – abdominal wall muscle and uterine.) It’s so weird to not have that sharp all-over abdominal pain! (I still wake up in pain, bah. But it’s not as horrible!)

Representation of disability I like – in “Tears of the Giraffe” (2nd book in “No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency”) there’s a 12 year old girl who uses a wheelchair. She most likely will work in the mechanic’s shop. The mechanic wanted her 5 year old brother to take over after he dies, but the kid doesn’t care about cars. She does, and he’s very happy – girls can be mechanics too and we’ll just fix this and this so she can access everything.

The girl could have just been a pitiful figure – she lived on the orphan farm! she’s in a wheelchair! But I know she will develop more over the series.

I hope that was spoiler free enough for those who want to read the series but haven’t go to the 2nd one yet.

Gnatalby – it’ll be 50 by the time my classes start. Memphis weather… I think there was 50/50 chance we’d have tornadoes instead of snow – jumpity jump jump go the temperatures – the day before it snowed, it was the warmest it’s been in weeks – above freezing all day!

A sign of my quite obvious immaturity – we were watching “Family Feud” and the question was “what would be difficult if you had crutches?” (The top answer was “walk,” obviously.) My first thought? Jump on the trampoline.

The people that plow the parking lots in my apartment complex dumped the snow onto the sidewalk I use to get to my car. Making it so I have to trudge through a snowbank with my cane. Not the only cane user here either, and we have scooter users too. I am not pleased.

The incredible irony being, they dumped the snow right on the section of the sidewalk that the only ramp is on.

The story is titled “Coloured lasers may offer a way to treat epilepsy.” This is relevant to me as an “FWE”, but why I’m linking it is the paragraph about how the discovery might also lead to treatments for other conditions like Parkinson’s and–this is the cool part–chronic pain.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you all about fibromyalgia still being dismissed as a figment of the imagination even though neurological meds are marketed to treat it, or the gender factor in play here… 😛

Why is it so hard for TV producers to add captioning to a webcast of a TV show that airs with captioning? Particularly when the show in question was both produced and captioned by the public TV station that practically invented online captioning?

I really wanted to see the PBS documentary This Emotional Life after I missed it earlier this week. So I went over to PBS’ web site to watch it… and of course, no captions. Sorry, but with my screwy auditory processing, I can’t watch three 2-hour blocks of documentary without captioning to fall back on.

The show was produced by WGBH, the PBS affiliate in Boston. Who also did the captioning in-house. And who were one of the pioneers in actually getting TV shows captioned online with Nova. However, WGBH had nothing to do with actually posting the show online, as I found out when I contacted them; that was done by PBS at the national level.

Thankfully, it’s rerunning on the other PBS station that I get today, so I’m recording it. And then ripping the captioning from the recording to my computer. I’ve also contacted the This Emotional Life people to see if they can possibly get captioning or transcripts added to the web site…